Dim chords

The dim (diminished) chords are not chords you will use very often, but it’s still good to be familiar with this category of chords. If you play a dim chord you will hear that these chords lack harmony and this is because of the structure of the notes.

A common function for these chords is to be used as a chromatic transposition chords, like a between chord - which is most common in blues and jazz. If you are interesting in the theory, the dim chord consists of a flatten third and a fifth besides the root. If we compare the notes of a C major and a Cdim the notes are C - E - G (C major) and C - Eb - Gb (Cdim). A diminished chord can be written with "dim" (Cdim) or "º" (Cº).

The easiest way to learn dim chords is to memorize to shapes that are moveable. Below you can see the shapes for dim and dim7 chords. The lowest note is the root (see table below for full overview).